Table of Contents
Review: Zulutrade
Use: Social Trading Site for Forex, Stocks, Commodities
Usefulness
Most valuable for new traders. Useful learning tool.
User-friendliness
Beginner friendly. Feels more like a video game than a trading platform.
Cost
Cheaper than most competitors.
Customer Support
They get your problems sorted, but nothing spectacular.
I Like
- Small spreads. It's Cheap!
- Wide broker selection
- Loads of profitable traders to copy
- US traders allowed
- Zuluguard user protection
I Don't Like
- Has less traders than Etoro
- Ability to copy demo accounts
- Riskier traders
- Bankroll management is difficult
Summary: Overall it’s a great tool for beginner traders to copy the success of profitable traders. In addition to copying, you can learn their strategies, ask questions and trade on your own if you want to.
I really like the small fees and the quantity of profitable traders to follow. However to get good results, you need to figure out the right people to copy for long term success.
Why I Started Using ZuluTrade
The reason why I was looking for social trading sites was to find some actual profitable traders and find out how they were trading. And with a site like Zulutrade, I could automatically copy their trades (and results) plus learn their techniques and ask them questions.
While I was aware of various social trading sites like Etoro, I couldn’t really trade there as I was then based in the US. I’d heard that Etoro’s closest competitor Zulutrade had gathered over 500 000 users, so I figured there had to be some true gems there.
Simple math: generally 95% of traders are profitable. Zulutrade has 500 000+ users, which means that there are on average roughly 25 000 profitable traders.
With Zulutrade I could rank them by how much profit they’ve made and pick the best performers to copy with my own account automatically.
One of the main reasons why social trading platforms are seeing exponential growth is that they bring together professional traders’ skill and beginner traders’ capital while creating a win-win situation for both.
The pro’s make a small cut from the capital that is allocated to them and the beginners can simply join in on the profitable trades.
Below is a screenshot from Zulutrade top traders’ results. The graph on the right shows total amount of profit earned in the past year by the top 5 traders that can be copied.
Who is ZuluTrade Meant For
- Are you still looking for a good strategy to use for trading?
- Are you more of a beginner trader?
- Are you interested in copying other traders with your own capital?
- Would you like to ask questions from professional traders?
If you answered YES to most of these questions, I guess it’s fair to say that Zulutrade is a good option for you.
If not, I’d recommend to not waste your time on it, because I pretty much listed most of its benefits. For advanced traders I usually recommend Interactive Brokers. More difficult to use and requires more capital, but tighter spreads and more customisable.
Main Features
#1 Ability to Copy Pro Traders
That goes without saying. This is the key factor that has contributed to the success of social trading platforms such as Zulutrade.
Before you had to figure things out by yourself provided that you didn’t have a mentor or someone to teach you their strategies. Now you can just copy paste a profitable trader in a few clicks of your mouse.
As mentioned before, there is numerous research on the topic of profitable traders. The research suggest that only 5% of retail traders are profitable. This means that only 1 in every 20 traders will make a profit out of their trading ventures.
The odds are stacked highly against you. However, with a social trading platform such as Zulutrader, you’ll be able to locate those 5% or even the top 5 traders out of 500 000.
The above picture shows the current rankings of top 4 traders in Zulutrade. They are ranked based on the total amount of real money that has been put to copy them.
The first guy seems to be a Russian and he has made 615% return in the past year. His max drawdown (biggest loss) has only been 13%, which is a good result considering his total gain.
He manages to win at 85% win ratio. Checking through his stats, I would personally like to follow him and also try to figure out how he does that.
In order to start copying another trader’s results, all you need to do is push the orange “Follow” button, which will prompt the following box:
Here you need to choose:
- The amount you want to use for copying the chosen trader. (75% is the max)
- Follow mode, this means how much size to use per trade that is copied. I usually use 0,1 lots with my 5000$ account.
- Max open positions. I usually put it at no limit. However, if you want to, you can cap the amount of traders open at one time.
Then press Follow again and you’re all set
Overall: There are a number of profitable traders active on the Zulutrade platform. You can easily find the ones that suit your profit target and risk appetite.
#2 Ability to Trade on Your Own
I’d say that Zulutrade has one of the most decent trading platform out of all the social trading sites out there. The platform is super easy to use and has some basic customisation options available.
They are sufficient for a beginner to medium level trader, although if you are more advanced, there are better options for you. You would need to have a bigger account though.
Opening a trade is really easy, all you need to do is to push the buy or sell price on the upper left corner.
From here you need to enter the amount you want to trade with, the Profit Target and Stop loss in pips.
Once You’ve entered them, click SELL and you’re all set.
Now as you’ve entered the trade, you will see: your stop loss level (the higher dotted line), the current price level (the middle dotted line) and the target price level (the lower level).
Also on the bottom, it shows the current profit or loss, which is rather convenient.
If you click on the small arrow on your left, you’ll see the whole list of instruments that are able to trade with. The screener also shows the spread, which seem to be rather low when you’re trading by yourself.
Eg. EUR/USD spread is only 0.4 pips, which is super low.
The spreads are usually bigger when you copy other traders. However it is better to pay higher spread on a profitable strategy instead of paying less but having no clue on what to do.
Overall: it is a surprisingly good platform to use for trading by yourself. It’s easy to use and has low spreads (low spread equals low trading costs). Customisability may not be sufficient for pro traders, but I personally find it plentiful.
#3 Customer Support
- 24/7 Customer Support
- 28 Languages Supported
- 24/7 Hotline
The main trouble with a lot of brokers is their shitty customer support service.
I tested out Zulutrade’s support to see how fast they answer, how well can they explain things to me and how they solve my problems overall.
In my own personal experience, the customer service is solid. All my problems have been solved quickly all the questions have been answered in a pleasing manner. Overall they get your problems sorted.
Trading Platforms Offered
- - Desktop Platform
- - Tablet Platform
- - Mobile Platform
- - Web Platform
All possible platforms are offered for Zulutrade customers. Just choose one that is the most comfortable for you.
I personally like to trade via the Web Platform and sometimes check my results through my iPhone.
Available Brokers
Zulutrade actually offers a myriad of brokers to choose from. Their main broker that is integrated to their system is AAAfx. They are based in Greece, which adds more trust compared to most other brokers that are based in Cyprus.
Other brokers that are offered do charge an additional fee from Zulutrade users, while AAAfx doesn’t. Based on my own experience, AAAfx has the lowest spreads because of that.
However there might be other factors besides having the cheapest trading costs. If you’re from the United States, you would need to choose another broker.
If you’re already accustomed to a different broker, you might want to connect that account with Zulutrade. In total there are over 50 brokers to choose from.
General Stats
- Minimum Deposit - 300$
- Leverage - Up to 1:200
- Users - 500 000+
- Established - in 2007
- Based in - Greece
- Signal providers - 10 000+
NB! If you have personal experience with Zulutrade, please drop a comment below and share your insights.
Thank you,
Paul
I transitioned to them from etoro and found that I like their proprietary platform AAAfx more and they have way smaller spreads. I’m not sure if the spreads have a big effect on my bottom line, I think not, but I still prefer lower spreads.
Not so many traders to copy compared to etoro, but still a valid amount there.
Robert, that’s a valid piece of information there, thank you for that!
Tried opening a live account but couldn’t. There are no brokers that are offered to U.S residents so it doesn’t work for us
Hi Tony,
Yes, unfortunately this is true. They’ve changed it since 2018. Currently there is no good option for US-based traders.